The City When It Rains (27 page)

“Lexie's a space cadet.”

“No, she's not,” Corman said. “And you know it.”

“Jeffrey's a twit.”

“That's not true either,” Corman said. “But I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about me. Why should Lucy stay with me? Why would she be better off?”

Edgar shook his head, as if defeated. “I can't answer that, David. I really can't. Maybe you were right the first time. Maybe it's because you're my brother. I love you. When you love somebody, you want them to have what they want. You want Lucy. So, there. I want you to have Lucy. Maybe it's just that simple.”

Corman slumped back into his seat. “That's not good enough, Edgar. Not for me. Not for Lucy.”

“Well, what are you looking for?” Edgar asked. “A compliment? You want me to say what a great father you are?”

“No.”

“Good,” Edgar said bluntly. “Because there are problems.” He looked at Corman fervently. “We're talking about very basic things here, David. Support. How basic can you get?”

“It always comes down to that.”

“Out of the dreamworld, yes, that's what it comes down to,” Edgar said. “Support. Protection. How well you can provide these things.” He leaned toward him. “Listen, I see Patty, right? Okay, maybe to some people that's wrong. But let me ask you a question. Does it take anything out of Giselle's mouth? Does it mean the rain comes through the roof?” He shook his head. “No. So really, when it comes down to it, who gives a shit? It's something anybody can understand. Nobody's hungry. Nobody's out in the … the …” He glanced toward the window. “Nobody's out in the fucking rain.” He shrugged. “Out of the dreamworld, that's the way it is.”

Corman remained silent for a moment, staring into Edgar's exasperated face, then glanced away from him, toward the front of the restaurant. The rain had slackened. “I'd better go,” he said. “Before it starts up again.”

Edgar nodded wearily. “I wish I could have been more help.”

“Don't worry about it.”

“It's you I worry about,” Edgar said.

“I'll find a way,” Corman assured him.

Edgar pulled himself to his feet. “As always,” he said. “Whatever I can do, I'll do.”

Corman offered him a consoling smile. “I know.”

They walked outside and stood for a moment in the doorway.

“At least let me give you a ride home,” Edgar said after a moment.

“All right, thanks.”

The ride was very short, and at the end of it Edgar suddenly draped his arm around Corman's shoulders. “Thanks for listening to my bullshit, anyway,” he said. “I mean, about Patty.”

Corman nodded.

Edgar's face softened suddenly. “I really feel like I have a brother, someone at my side, you know? I hope you can feel that way, too.”

Corman smiled thinly then realized that he had never in his life felt more entirely alone. “Absolutely,” he said.

As he stepped off the elevator, Corman noticed Mr. Ingersoll standing at his door, quietly reading a piece of paper someone had taped to it.

“Oh, sorry,” Ingersoll said quickly, when he caught Corman in his eye. “I wasn't meaning to …”

“What is it?”

“Looks like an eviction notice,” Ingersoll said. “From Trang. The asshole.”

Corman began to read the notice.

“Slope-headed bastard,” Ingersoll hissed. “Ever notice his teeth? Like they've been filed down or something.” He shook his head. “Slope-headed bastard. Some right he's got. How long's he in this country? Two years? Three? Five at the most? What right's he got to …”

“It says I have ten days,” Corman said.

Ingersoll looked at him sadly. “To show cause, right? To show cause why they shouldn't kick you out?”

“Yeah.”

Ingersoll stared at the notice sourly. “Back when, in the old days, the Depression, they used to try to kick people out, put their furniture on the streets. But it wasn't that easy. They had hell to pay then. You took your life in your hands, you fucked with people's homes.”

“Times have changed,” Corman said. He pulled the notice from the door and waved it in the air. “Do you have any idea when they put this up?”

“I saw the little slope-headed bastard prowling around,” Ingersoll said. “Maybe around eight, something like that.”

“Around eight,” Corman repeated to himself, hoping Lucy hadn't seen it.

“Some right, he's got,” Ingersoll said irritably. “Did he build the bridges, that little gook? The buildings? The goddamn skyscrapers? Did he build them?” He waved his hand. “He was wading through a rice paddy when we built this city.” His lips curled downward bitterly. “New York, New York,” he sang coldly. “What a wonderful town.”

Lucy and Victor were sitting in front of the television, polishing off a bowl of popcorn, when Corman walked in.

“Uncle Victor said I could have butter,” Lucy told him.

“Gives it flavor,” Victor said. He looked at Corman pointedly, all but plastered the eviction notice to his face. “I hope everything is all right,” he said.

“Everything's fine,” Corman said crisply. He could feel the paper beneath his arm, hanging there, a strange crinkly growth. He quickly stepped over behind the sofa and touched Lucy's hair. “What are you watching?”

“Some movie about a stolen bird,” Lucy said. She looked over at him. “We had Japanese food.”

Victor laughed. “She's a real sushi expert now.”

“Then we saw a show,” Lucy said.

“Which one?” Corman asked.

“Cats.
It was pretty good. But there wasn't much of a story.”

Victor grinned happily. “Lively, though.” His eyes swept back toward the television.

Corman glanced at the screen. It was a colorized version of
The
Maltese Falcon.
Humphrey Bogart was talking out of the side of his mouth to a bemused and unflappable Sydney Greenstreet. Both of them looked as if their faces were covered with pink icing.

“It's about your bedtime, isn't it?” Corman said to Lucy.

“It's almost over,” Lucy protested. “Can I just see the end?”

“Okay,” Corman said. He looked at Victor and forced a smile.“You want to stay and see the end, too?”

“Sure, why not?” Victor said. He put his arm around Lucy's shoulder and squeezed. “Should I see the end of it with you?”

“If you want to,” Lucy said with a shrug, her eyes fixed on the screen again.

“Maybe I will, too,” Corman said wearily. He pulled a chair over from the dining table, sat down, and watched the movie as if he were actually interested in it. For a time, he was able to follow the action, but his mind began to drift, and soon everything seemed strangely funny, Trang's teeth, Edgar's affair, the endlessly falling rain, absolutely everything, as if it were all one big joke that thundered through space, raising the rooftops. Then suddenly, he thought of Sarah Rosen, saw her face amid the throng, staring vacantly and chewing her lip as the punchline finally came home.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX

H
E WOKE UP
sweating, damp sheets knotted around his waist, his hands cold, clammy and trembling slightly, as if he had spent the night cold turkey. He stood up and walked to the bathroom, avoiding his own face in the mirror as he washed himself and brushed his teeth.

When he'd finished, he awakened Lucy but hardly spoke to her as she ate her breakfast at the small folding card table that served as the apartment's dining room.

On the street, he maintained the same silence, marching her to school at a rapid pace, an irritable guard escorting a prisoner.

She gave him a quick kiss at the school gate, then hurried away.

It was still early, so he walked to Eighth Avenue, ordered a coffee at a small diner there, lit a cigarette and reconsidered what Scarelli had told him several days before: his only hope was a mystery.

It was raining steadily again when he finally finished the last of his coffee and walked outside. The traffic on the avenue was barely moving, the cars inching forward heavily, as if continually blown back by the gusting winds. To get out of it, he retreated under a wildly flapping canopy and waited for the squall to pass, his eyes sweeping up the street while he calculated what he could save, along with what, in order to do that, he would have to lose. Everything passed through his mind, some things quickly, others suspended for a great while, Lucy more than any other, but after her, Sarah Rosen and the mystery. He saw her suddenly from a different angle, one that hadn't been captured in any of his photographs, and in which it was hard for him to figure out his own exact position. It was as if he were lying near her on the wet pavement, her face lifted toward him, poised on its shattered chin. The dead eyes stared directly into his, the torn hand growing large in the foreground as it reached across the slick paving stones to where his own eyes seemed to look back at her—staring, he realized with a sudden chill, from behind the rain-streaked, sightless pupils of the doll.

It was nearly ten o'clock when he got off the Number 1 at the 116th Street stop, then pressed through the crowds of students who were hurrying down Columbia Walk toward their classes. He stopped at the entrance to Low Library without really knowing why, then glanced down the stairs and across the esplanade that swept toward Butler Library. The rain had left small puddles in the brown grass, and as his eyes moved from one to another in that quick, darting motion Lucy had noticed and called “connecting the dots,” he thought of the old days again, when he and Julian had vied for Lexie like two contending swains. They seemed like pages from a book he'd liked once, but no more, had no desire to read again.

He turned quickly, walked inside, then down a corridor to a room marked
RECORDS.
“I'm trying to get a little information,” he said to the woman he found behind a large wooden counter.

She looked up from a stack of computer sheets. She wore glasses with pink tinted lenses, a style he'd even noticed on a few shooters in recent weeks.

“About a former student,” he added. “She graduated in 1988.”

“What do you need to know?”

“Her major. Maybe get a look at her transcript. Anything might help.”

“Some things require written requests,” the woman told him.

“Just give me the stuff that doesn't.”

The woman snapped the sharpened pencil from her ear. “What's the name?”

“Rosen. Sarah Judith Rosen.”

The woman wrote it down, disappeared into another room, and reappeared with a sheet of yellow legal-sized paper.

“That's all I can give without some other kind of authorization,” she said. “It's not very much.”

Corman took the paper. “Thanks,” he said as he began to read it.

It told him even less than he'd expected, certainly not enough to put a charge in Willie Scarelli. Rosen had graduated in 1988, as he already knew. Aside from that, the paper gave him only one additional fact. She'd majored in English Literature.

Corman looked up once he'd finished. “One more thing,” he said. “Do you know where I might find a professor in the Philosophy Department. His name is Peter Oppenheim.”

She reached for a directory, flipped through the pages and glanced back up at him. “Jay Hall, 308,” she said.

Oppenheim was a short, somewhat stocky man, balding as he neared forty, and he looked at Corman as if he were a workman who'd been summoned to repair something in the office, recaulk the windows, shore up the sagging floor.

“Yes?” he said when he glimpsed Corman standing at the door.

“I'm looking for Professor Oppenheim.”

“I'm Professor Oppenheim.”

Corman took a short, tentative step into the office and adopted the diffident, somewhat formal tone he remembered from graduate school. “I was wondering if I could have a word with you.”

“About what?”

“Sarah Rosen.”

Oppenheim's face betrayed nothing. “Are you with the police?”

“No,” Corman answered immediately, then realized how odd the question was. “Have you talked to them?”

“No,” Oppenheim said. “But I know what happened to Sarah, and I thought there might be questions about her death.”

“From the police?”

“The authorities,” Oppenheim said. “Whomever they might be.” He turned from his desk, as if to get a better view of Corman's face. “Who are you?”

“My name's Corman. I'm a photographer.”

“What did you have to do with Sarah?”

“I was there after she … I'm a free-lance … I took some pictures.”

“Pictures?”

“I didn't sell them,” Corman said. He took another small step into the office, noting the photograph of Einstein above Oppenheim's desk. He remembered the ones he'd tacked to the wall of his own office—Shakespeare, Dante, other leading lights—and wondered whose face he'd hang now if he still had an office of his own. Lazar, perhaps. Lucy, without doubt.